Everyone agrees with us on climate change—especially when we’re wrong

By just about every measure, the vast majority of scientists in general—and climate scientists in particular—have been convinced by the evidence that human activities are altering the climate. However, in several countries, a significant portion of the public has concluded that this consensus doesn't exist. That has prompted a variety of studies aimed at understanding the large disconnect between scientists and the public, with results pointing the finger at everything from the economy to the weather. Other studies have noted societal influences on acceptance, including ideology and cultural identity.

Those studies have generally focused on the US population, but the public acceptance of climate change is fairly similar in Australia. There, a new study has looked at how societal tendencies can play a role in maintaining mistaken beliefs. The authors of the study have found evidence that two well-known behaviors—the "false consensus" and "pluralistic ignorance"—are helping to shape public opinion in Australia.

False consensus is the tendency of people to think that everyone else shares their opinions. This can arise from the fact that we tend to socialize with people who share our opinions, but the authors note that the effect is even stronger "when we hold opinions or beliefs that are unpopular, unpalatable, or that we are uncertain about." In other words, our social habits tend to reinforce the belief that we're part of a majority, and we have a tendency to cling to the sense that we're not alone in our beliefs.

Pluralistic ignorance is similar, but it's not focused on our own beliefs. Instead, sometimes the majority of people come to believe that most people think a certain way, even though the majority opinion actually resides elsewhere.

As it turns out, the authors found evidence of both these effects. They performed two identical surveys of over 5,000 Australians, done a year apart; about 1,350 people took the survey both times, which let the researchers track how opinions evolve. Participants were asked to describe their own opinion on climate change, with categories including "don't know," "not happening," "a natural occurrence," and "human-induced." After voicing their own opinion, people were asked to estimate what percentage of the population would fall into each of these categories.

In aggregate, over 90 percent of those surveyed accepted that climate change was occurring (a rate much higher than we see in the US), with just over half accepting that humans were driving the change. Only about five percent felt it wasn't happening, and even fewer said they didn't know. The numbers changed only slightly between the two polls.

The false consensus effect became obvious when the researchers looked at what these people thought that everyone else believed. Here, the false consensus effect was obvious: every single group believed that their opinion represented the plurality view of the population. This was most dramatic among those who don't think that the climate is changing; even though they represent far less than 10 percent of the population, they believed that over 40 percent of Australians shared their views. Those who profess ignorance also believed they had lots of company, estimating that their view was shared by a quarter of the populace.

Among those who took the survey twice, the effect became even more pronounced. In the year between the surveys, they respondents went from estimating that 30 percent of the population agreed with them to thinking that 45 percent did. And, in general, this group was the least likely to change its opinion between the two surveys.

But there was also evidence of pluralistic ignorance. Every single group grossly overestimated the number of people who were unsure about climate change or convinced it wasn't occurring. Even those who were convinced that humans were changing the climate put 20 percent of Australians into each of these two groups.

In the end, the false consensus effect is swamped by this pluralistic ignorance. Even though everybody tends to think their own position is the plurality, those who accept climate change is real still underestimate how many people share their views. Meanwhile, everyone overestimates the self-labelled "skeptic" population.

The authors suggest that this could, in part, be a result of the media's tendency to always offer two opposing opinions, even on issues where one is a fringe belief. They also point out that it would be good to perform a similar study in other nations where the dynamics of public belief are different.

274 Reader Comments

It should be obvious that adding gasses into the atmosphere will eventually affect the earth; if matter is never created nor destroyed, but transformed, we are transforming a hell of a lot. More importantly though we are all breathing those gasses in. I would love to walk through center city Philadelphia where every car was electric/hydrogen/whatever and be able to feel in my lungs what clean air is like. I hope I see that day my lifetime.

If you want to point to one article, written by a journalist with no scientific background, claiming that the consensus of the vast majority of climate scientists, and vast majorities of science academies is wrong, the least you can do is find one which can do basic math. Quick, what is 2012-1997? (hint, not 16).

From the very first sentence of the article I posted:"The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week."

the term "climate change" has been in use longer than "global warming".

(follow-on quick quiz: what do the last two letters in "IPCC" stand for? in which year in the 1980s was it founded?)

The AGW people abandoned the term Global Warming after the actual science started discrediting them. Anyone who looks at the data and the trends can see that global temps have been trending down not up since the end of the 90's. So they switched to Climate Change. There are 2 problems with them using this term. First it makes them look like idiots for claiming we can stop the Earth's climate system from changing. The Earth's climate is always in a state of change. Second, they are nto arguing about the fact that the climate is changing or always changing. They are arguing that Human activity is to blame for the changes we are observing even when the science says otherwise. Human activity can and does destroy animal habitats and pushes some species to extinction but that's a far cry from heating or cooling the planet.

I like how the people with the signs are leaning on a car that gets 14 miles to the gallon on the highway and smells like fuel.

This is about as relevant as commenting on their shitty fashion sense. The gas mileage of the car they are sitting on has nothing at all to do with the discussion. Can you try to address their argument instead of resorting to childishness?

I think this graph really says it all in response: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47 In a dataset with a great deal of variation, it's certainly possible to find blocks of time where the short term and long term trends are at odds. Much more of a stretch to think that, even if we were reverting back to year 2000 temperatures, that would prove the end of a 100+ year trend.

Yeah, keep that head of yours in the sand. How dare the Daily Mail use data from the Met Office to conclude that there has been virtually no warming in almost 16 years. The nerve of those buck toothed red-necked conservative mouth-breathers...

The AGW people abandoned the term Global Warming after the actual science started discrediting them.

looking what a google search for "global warming" throws up, i see results from the likes of the New York Times, the National Resources Defence Council, the EPA, NOAA, Scientific American, the UCS, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, ThinkProgress, Environmental Defence Fund, Greenpeace, HuffPo...

if "AGW people" are no longer supposed to be using that term, it would seem the message got lost somewhere along the way.

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Anyone who looks at the data and the trends can see that global temps have been trending down not up since the end of the 90's.

as i pointed out up-thread, the terms "climate change" and "global warming" have been used interchangeably for decades now -- at least as far back as the 1980s, if not earlier. where have you got this strange notion from?

The AGW people abandoned the term Global Warming after the actual science started discrediting them.

looking what a google search for "global warming" throws up, i see results from the likes of the New York Times, the National Resources Defence Council, the EPA, NOAA, Scientific American, the UCS, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, ThinkProgress, Environmental Defence Fund, Greenpeace, HuffPo...

if "AGW people" are no longer supposed to be using that term, it would seem the message got lost somewhere along the way.

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Anyone who looks at the data and the trends can see that global temps have been trending down not up since the end of the 90's.

as i pointed out up-thread, the terms "climate change" and "global warming" have been used interchangeably for decades now -- at least as far back as the 1980s, if not earlier. where have you got this strange notion from?

I think he is butthurt because Pluto is no longer considered a planet. He is taking his rage out on all areas of science.

Unfortunately, this is just confirmation bias. You have no actual way to attribute what you observed with local weather to climate change. If what you said was a valid argument, then someone's post of how it has been normal weather in their region for the past 10 years would be a valid counter-argument to climate change. Local weather is not stable, even over several years. Look at the unusual wet period followed by the unusual dry period that led to the dust bowl. I know you're trying to help, but don't point to events like a lake in your area not freezing all of the way as proof of climate change. It's counter-productive.

In the beginning of my statement I said that not all places are warming. Regarding a "lake in your area", I'm referring to Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, an area larger than many countries. These are more like freshwater seas than lakes. The northern half of Huron and Michigan used to freeze by mid-winter. The water has warmed enough that they're not freezing anywhere near the amount they used to.

No, observations from a single area don't prove warming or climate change, just as one area not warming doesn't disprove it. It's long term observations from all over put together that demonstrate a global trend. Don't remove parts of my statement in order to twist the rest of it. Before I listed some of my observations I said

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I won't pretend to know how it's affecting all the different parts of the earth, but I can see quite well what is changing here.

of course the easiest way to check whether temperatures did level off at that point is to extend the pre-1997 trend line, and see how it matches post-1997 temperatures.

yeah, Rose is full of shit.

No, he's not full of shit. If you look at the graph, there has been virtually no (or very little) warming in almost 16 years. That is his point and he made it.

Speaking of cherry picking, the NSIDC graph starts around 1979 which is only 33 years worth of data. How people can say the Arctic ice melting in recent times is unprecedented and the worst on record is beyond me...

The AGW people abandoned the term Global Warming after the actual science started discrediting them.

looking what a google search for "global warming" throws up, i see results from the likes of the New York Times, the National Resources Defence Council, the EPA, NOAA, Scientific American, the UCS, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, ThinkProgress, Environmental Defence Fund, Greenpeace, HuffPo...

if "AGW people" are no longer supposed to be using that term, it would seem the message got lost somewhere along the way.

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Anyone who looks at the data and the trends can see that global temps have been trending down not up since the end of the 90's.

as i pointed out up-thread, the terms "climate change" and "global warming" have been used interchangeably for decades now -- at least as far back as the 1980s, if not earlier. where have you got this strange notion from?

And as I pointed out the proponents of Global Warming or more accurately Anthropogenic global Warming have dropped Global Warming and started using Climate change. While one CAN dispute the notion that human activity is warming the planet one can't dispute the well known fact that the climate is forever changing. No shit the term Climate change has been used for a long time. That isn't the argument. The argument is the fact that the AGW proponents dropped the term Global Warming for Climate Change.

By just about every measure, the vast majority of scientists in general—and climate scientists in particular—have been convinced by the evidence that human activities are altering the climate.

Part of the problem among our circle has been this. Some have been so boastful in their arguments as to push the idea that humans are *the only* factor in climate change. This, I believe, represents a vast overestimation of, or esteem in, the human presence. Science has shown that climate change has happened before and will happen again without our paltry contributions. We are not the Earth. Once we couch the argument in more realistic and *scientific* terms, we may be more likely to convince others of the contributions we *do* make to climate change. Contributions we may mitigate. And, indeed, contributions we may not except by dying off.

While it is always good to be skeptical about inflated claims of importance I think we have to begin to acknowledge that in the realm of the biosphere of the Earth and things that it closely couples with like the climate, that mankind is becoming paramount. For instance we produce 2/3 of all fixed nitrogen, we've created almost 1/3 of the CO2 that is in the air, and we directly control over 43% of the net total biological productivity of the land surface of the Earth. The biomass of humans and our animals now make up a very significant fraction of the biomass of animals and I believe a MAJORITY of the biomass of vertebrate life on Earth. We may once have been inconsequential, we are no longer. As far as we know the only other instance of a single species having such a vast prevalence on Earth was Listrosaurus at the end of the Permian. 95+% of all species went down (not that Listrosaurus was a cause, but clearly large imbalances aren't indicators of a healthy ecosystem).

The climate is also uniquely sensitive to small effects. The natural climate variations of the late Quaternary have been particularly large and particularly sensitive. This means the situation is particularly ripe for humanity to have an outsized impact. While it is true that climate WILL change on its own we are quite capable of creating larger and faster changes than any natural process could. This is pretty close to not even arguable anymore.

Again, some degree of skepticism is always necessary, but there's a difference between being right and being skeptical.

Unfortunately, this is just confirmation bias. You have no actual way to attribute what you observed with local weather to climate change. If what you said was a valid argument, then someone's post of how it has been normal weather in their region for the past 10 years would be a valid counter-argument to climate change. Local weather is not stable, even over several years. Look at the unusual wet period followed by the unusual dry period that led to the dust bowl. I know you're trying to help, but don't point to events like a lake in your area not freezing all of the way as proof of climate change. It's counter-productive.

In the beginning of my statement I said that not all places are warming. Regarding a "lake in your area", I'm referring to Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, an area larger than many countries. These are more like freshwater seas than lakes. The northern half of Huron and Michigan used to freeze by mid-winter. The water has warmed enough that they're not freezing anywhere near the amount they used to.

No, observations from a single area don't prove warming or climate change, just as one area not warming doesn't disprove it. It's long term observations from all over put together that demonstrate a global trend. Don't remove parts of my statement in order to twist the rest of it. Before I listed some of my observations I said

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I won't pretend to know how it's affecting all the different parts of the earth, but I can see quite well what is changing here.

You're missing the point. You shouldn't have posted that at all. You don't know that the lakes not freezing is a result of climate change. It's like me saying, "I won't pretend to know how the federal reserves interest rate policies affect commodities, but I can see quite well that my gas prices have gone way up." Those are weasel words. You start out by saying you don't understand it, but then assign it as a causality to something you observed locally without any scientific basis.

And as I pointed out the proponents of Global Warming or more accurately Anthropogenic global Warming have dropped Global Warming and started using Climate change. While one CAN dispute the notion that human activity is warming the planet one can't dispute the well known fact that the climate is forever changing. No shit the term Climate change has been used for a long time. That isn't the argument. The argument is the fact that the AGW proponents dropped the term Global Warming for Climate Change.

just repeating the same blatantly stupid claim over and over doesn't make it true. sorry.

Just a question to the Believers: do people really expect the BRIC to surrender job growth and social stability in return for lower carbon emissions and higher energy prices?

Actually, I expect them to stop blocking renewable-energy efforts to protect their vested fossil-fuel interests. I expect them to stop being so short-sighted, so they can see that given enough research, renewable energy will cause cheaper energy. I expect them to understand that job growth means nothing when entire industries collapse because of climate change.

There is one thing you should consider. The same energy interests you think are stopping this progress are the same companies that will be selling you renewable energy in the future. Already, Chevron is the world's largest producer of geothermal energy.

Far from "blocking renewable-energy efforts," these companies are pouring money into it. But they won't be getting the bulk of energy from renewable sources until it makes economic sense. All the government subsidies in the world won't change that.

The authors suggest that this could, in part, be a result of the media's tendency to always offer two opposing opinions, even on issues where one is a fringe belief.

I really don't like this. I get that it is supposed to make the media "fair" and "balanced", but it gives undue attention. Not all stories have two sides, science isn't an argument. This is like giving the other side in the "sky is blue" debate. There is no debate! Just people that are living in reality and delusional people.

+1!!!!

reminds me of an episode of The Newsroom (great great show)... where the staff was arguing why they should always be giving two sides to the story, when one side is obviously proven to be wrong.

the same goes for teaching evolution in school. is there another side (read: opposition) of teaching evolution? of course. but is that side backed by any credible facts or scientific data? of course not. yet some areas of the country (due to a loud and vocal minority), are forced to teach both 'sides' of this topic.

No, he's not full of shit. If you look at the graph, there has been virtually no (or very little) warming in almost 16 years. That is his point and he made it.

yes, and he made it by cherry-picking, which clearly shows he doesn't understand the scientific method on even the most basic, primary-school level: if you carefully choose just the data that supports your case, you can prove more or less anything you want.

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Speaking of cherry picking, the NSIDC graph starts around 1979

that's by definition not cherry-picking, because 1979 is when the first satellite data was gathered.

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How people can say the Arctic ice melting in recent times is unprecedented and the worst on record is beyond me...

how do they know it's the lowest on record? they, uh, looked at all the measurements in the record and saw that the recent values are the lowest.

If global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, there is an easy solution: plant more trees and kill some people and animals off. Don't like that idea? Give me another solution that is actually possible. You are not going to make petrol use go away. You are not going to make people quit exhaling co2 unless you kill them. You are not going to make fire quit giving off carbon. Live with it. If global warming is caused by methane... we're pretty much fucked. Ditto if global warming is a natural occurrence.

Would I be correct in saying the anthropogenesis is the main disagreement? I am of the opinion that it's a combination of factors both anthropogenic and natural. But I also think that global warming is a bad name. I think it would more apt to refer to this as "sudden climate change".

Would I be correct in saying the anthropogenesis is the main disagreement? I am of the opinion that it's a combination of factors both anthropogenic and natural.

No, you'd be mistaken. The main disagreement is not whether rising CO2 levels have a forcing effect, as in warming. Everyone agrees that it does. The question is whether this warming effect is amplified by feedback mechanisms.

The real disagreement is about climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Some would put the consequent rise below 1 degree C. Others would put it as high as 4C or higher.

Everyone agrees that 1C is neither here nor there. Everyone also agrees that 4C or higher is probably real bad, verging to disaster.

The disagreement is about whether its likely. And if we don't know, what if anything our uncertainty makes a sensible public policy.

I see the opening declaration is generally accepted by those posting comments underneath, but, if it is only valid because it is held by those deemed suitably-qualified scientists, I doubt many of those posting comments would really hold respected opinions. That is, of course, dismissing those who agree with the same casual ignorance as those who conducted a study as to how it is possible everyone else didn't just roll over and accept this scientific consensus.

As fas as the consensus you accept is concerned, I wonder if you're basing this smugness on the commonly trumpeted 97% of those who were deemed qualified to answer confirming they believe man's activities are influencing the climate? If so, that would be 75 of the 10,000 asked? You do not qualify your opening declaration, so it's hard to know. As to quite what it was the 75 confirmed is another matter, which also applies to the sceptics' opinion. Is the climate changing? Yes, it always has. Do we know precisely what's changing it and how? No, otherwise all those magical computer models would have been right and they are not. Do we know some cataclysmic claims for man's influence upon the climate are just made up? Yes we do and we can point to the cheap stunt of the Maldives cabinet meeting under the water as a very good example of hysterical claims about rising sea levels. There are a great many other examples.

If you ask an informed sceptic if they accept the climate is changing, you will very likely be told they do. You may well also receive confirmation the sceptic accepts man's activity is contributing to the change, but the disagreement is likely to arise over how and by how much. A lot of the scepticism is born of the outrageous claims of those who seem desperate to impose an ever more costly life upon others, such as demanding basic foodstuffs be used to make fuel instead of be available to be eaten by the poor and hugely inefficient methods of electricity generation be forced upon consumers who are already struggling to pay their utility bills.

If a bio-fuel consumes more energy in production than it can provide, how environmentally friendly is it? If hysterical claims are made about a trace gas and it is called a pollutant, how much credibility do those making such claims sustain?

I was quite content to accept those better informed than I am that man's activities are causing the climate to change at an accelerating pace, until I noticed how swiftly the champions of this theory resorted to personal abuse at even the merest hint of dissent. That made me suspicious and these suspicions have continued to increase ever since.

Scientific consensus, such as it is, has been very wrong before, (flat earth, eugenics etc etc), so why must you make the foolish declaration it must be right this time? You can try as hard as you like, but you will not justify doing so until you can explain, in detail, every influence upon the climate. You might find there's a consensus no-one is anywhere near being able to do so.

Whatever. I never see any sign of global warming BS. Scientists cannot be trusted. They got their fat paycheck (which is from MY tax money) from "solving" problems they reported. No one else think this is a huge conflict of interests? We all hear those liberatars complaining and suggesting no industry can self regulate and we need government to "watch over" for the people. Now we are suppose to believe those so call "scientists" are telling the truth? Give me a break.

Holy crap. I didn't know it was possible to fit this much stupid into one post.

Well, you see, there was an opposite thing here in Australia, we have this academic, Professor Tim Flannery, who is pretty big in climate change stuff now, he's chief commissioner in the australian climate commission. However, he made headlines earlier this year, because we've been having a fair bit of rain last summer, and floods, and it's looking like as if the drought in Australia has been broken.

Prof. Flannery had made some predictions, stating that we're in drying trends, and he flippantly stated (i think it was flippant) some years ago, that our dams would be dry by now, but, they're spectacularly full. He went on the media circus to defend his honour by claiming that people were mistaking weather with climate; so for the links you posted, which is it? climate or weather?

I hate to be "that guy," but The Telegraph has a bit of a reputation as a cesspool when it comes to coverage of climate science. Looking closer at the story, we see that the Prof. Franks criticizing Flannery for not being a climate expert is, himself, not a climate expert. And kind of a shady figure besides. There is also nothing in the story indicating that a freak rainfall year overthrows predictions of long-term drought. The difference is not particularly academic, is it? You probably know something about the difference between signal and noise. In climate, one year (or even ten years) is noise. The underlying signal might not make itself apparent if you only look at short stretches of noisy data. Here's a simple demonstration: even if you intentionally create artificial data with a linear trend that you yourself put into it, adding some noise on top can produce short-term periods of no apparent signal, even though you know the signal is there (after all, you put it there).

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I think the other problem is, a true scientific model, would behave in a way i'm more accustomed to in my engineering, well at least i think it should (after all, who cares about anyone else...); for instance, we know how electrons behave in conductors, we can predict what will happen with a high degree of accuracy and precision, that's what all electronics is all about. We know how objects move around us, given narrow specifications, we predict with good accuracy and precision what will happen, but with climate modelling, none of this is getting predicted with any decent accuracy nor precision.

Climate modeling is not like forecasting the weather for a few days in advance. It's also not like circuitry models. There is a lot of inherent uncertainty in the system just because of the physical "chaos" in the climate, an aggregate of weather over long periods of time (usually defined as 30 years for climate). In the real world, there is a ton of year-to-year variation in temperature records, rainfall patterns, etc. It is extremely noisy data. You need a lot of data to overcome the noise and find any underlying signal. For that reason, extremely short periods of time (less than two decades) tends to have no meaningful signal. The year-to-year variation, the influence of short-term factors and cycles such as ENSO, and a host of other things swamp the signal. Anybody using time scales on the order of a decade or so is using too little data to overcome the noise without taking these factors into consideration. There are ways to remove some of the noise and see more of the signal in less of the data. That's just for the actual physical record, which modeling is supposed to simulate. Models are not going to reproduce history exactly down to which years were hot and which were cold. The inter-annual variation is not important because it will mostly cancel out. Same with decade-scale short-term cycles like ENSO. Because of this, models do not match the instrumental record on which decades are hot or cold, or get more or less rainfall. Again, they don't have to. What they need to do is capture the real world's physics in a realistic way. The precise timing of certain events is unimportant as long as you have realistic physics. They have to show that the system is basically the same, it works the same way. This can be tested by hindcasting, where you initialize the model with some real-world data at one point in the past and run it forward in time without any further data input. If the result roughly agrees with the actual record, it's a good indication that you've captured the relevant physics in the model. What we see when we do this is that our models are already good, and they've gotten better over time. They capture the same amount of short-term variability, they predict that there will be decades with little or no apparent warming even within an ongoing trend. What they don't do very well is predict short-term impacts, especially for specific regions of the globe. Nevertheless, there is sound science for several predictions about what to expect in certain areas. The wet can reasonably be expected to get wetter, and the dry can reasonably be expected to get drier. By how much? What's the precise timing of these trends? How steadily does the pattern hold in any one area? That's beyond our current capabilities, but this does not invalidate the overall practice of climate modeling and projecting. So it's not like predicting the weather for tomorrow and the day after, but it's not voodoo either. The scientific case is more than strong enough for action; we can safely rule out that the future will be rosy and pleasant if we keep going on under a business-as-usual scenario. We can say with confidence that doing something to curb our emissions will be less expensive than not doing it.

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What i'm saying is also, on a philosophical level, no reason to dismiss everything, but i honestly think that the science is not ready yet. If we understood it properly, the solution would be clear, and the problem would be clear.

The people who are actual experts in climate disagree with you, almost to the man. This isn't just about tooting their own horns either, since they are the most critical of all this climate science in the first place. It's their job to be critical of it and weed out bad ideas, come up with good ones, and test them against the real world. Their work has to be good because there are plenty of other experts in climate who have the knowledge and the will to tear it to shreds if it's bullshit.

SonicHgHog wrote:

I remember when it was Global Cooling.Then is was Global Warming.Then ok, its global climate change.

A) It has always been "climate change."B) There has been no point in time during the last forty years or so when global cooling was expected by most scientists to outpace global warming. There is a popular misconception that most scientists predicted a new ice age back in the 1970s, but that's not actually true.

fordmw wrote:

If global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, there is an easy solution: plant more trees and kill some people and animals off. Don't like that idea? Give me another solution that is actually possible.

Switch to less carbon-intensive energy sources that don't depend on burning hydrocarbons that have been stored underground for millions of years. It's not only possible and viable, it's an eventuality. Fossil fuels are finite and will become harder and harder to extract as we deplete the low-hanging carbon fruit. But there is not enough land on the face of the planet to plant enough trees to offset our current emissions.

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You are not going to make people quit exhaling co2 unless you kill them. You are not going to make fire quit giving off carbon.

This tells me that you have a few crazy ideas about the issue here. The CO2 you exhale or that's released by wildfires was already in the system. It's called the Carbon Cycle. What we're doing is introducing new CO2 by taking hydrocarbons out of geological lockboxes where it hasn't participated in the carbon cycle for millions of years. We can and must quit doing that at the rate we're presently doing it. It's going to happen anyway. The sooner we get started, the less trouble fossil fuels will cause for us in the near-term and our descendants in the long-term.

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If global warming is caused by methane... we're pretty much fucked.

"Caused by methane" is not something that happens in a vacuum. Increased methane release is partly a feedback to our carbon emissions; warming driven primarily by CO2 causes methane to be released from thawing permafrost and decaying wetlands more readily.

You probably know something about the difference between signal and noise. In climate, one year (or even ten years) is noise. The underlying signal might not make itself apparent if you only look at short stretches of noisy data. Here's a simple demonstration: even if you intentionally create artificial data with a linear trend that you yourself put into it, adding some noise on top can produce short-term periods of no apparent signal, even though you know the signal is there (after all, you put it there).

As an aside, there something that I've never found entirely convincing about the Tamino's "trend + noise" argument (he isn't the only one to use this argument before, by the way). It relates to what you say next:

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There is a lot of inherent uncertainty in the system just because of the physical "chaos" in the climate, an aggregate of weather over long periods of time (usually defined as 30 years for climate).

As the above Frontline documentary demonstrates, the political opposition to our Global Warming reality is entrenched enough to promote legislative paralysis. How much progress can we expect to make by relying upon a strategy that emphasizes raising energy costs? Why not develop a plan to lower energy costs instead?

I have of course seen the comments by renewable-energy proponents who believe that large-scale solar and wind solutions will usher in low energy costs. I find such optimism to be every bit as delusional as the assertion that GW is a hoax. In order to maximize our odds for achieving low cost targets, we must look to energy dense solutions. The base economic components are governed by the surface area and current density of our energy conversion system.

If we were to focus our R&D efforts on technologies that could form an end-to-end solution, then we would have a good chance of making it through the transition to sustainability. Some of the necessary technologies:

A viable plan assembled as a sort of planetary sustainability initiative (our national entry into the Thorium Race) could garner widespread public support as it injects some hope into our regrettable predicament. By 2050 our projected global energy consumption is expected to double or triple, and currently we have no conceivable way to address this. I know of no greater national security issue.

We are not alone in our problems, and it is certainly possible that economic rivals will find this "critical path" faster than we do, and with it numerous advantages.

It is long past due to stop our confused bickering and rather start fashioning a plan to break our political deadlock. Environmental groups will come to realize that the best way to protect wilderness, our ecosystem, our climate, and civilization is by consuming more energy, not less.

So global warming's not a natural occurrence? Do you have evidence of a lost civilisation? I ask because where I sit used to be under rather a lot of ice and that ice melted. That means the global climate cooled and then warmed-up again. We'll ignore the cooling bit, as that can't work for you, but your theory requires a substantial human population to have developed during this cold period which then disappeared after things warmed-up again. Presumably it was global warming that made them vanish? The warming I'm referring to was so recent the country I live in is still recovering from the removal of the weight of the ice and rising out of the sea. I don't mean 1850 by the way, it wasn't quite as recent as that. There's also evidence of glaciers having created the topography of the land near here, but even my elderly neighbour can't recall any glaciers around these parts. Mind you, it's not as if there's only been one Ice Age, is it? The planet's cooled and warmed-up again on a number of occasions during its history. All man-made, is it?

If the climate can only be warming because of man's activity, where is the evidence of this massive population that dwarfs what was believed to have existed during the history of man? Where is the industry that polluted the atmosphere during the last Ice Age to melt the ice? Presumably their vehicles all rusted away to nothing and their industry dried-up and blew away?

Yes, there is considerable doubt about "anthropogenesis" and there should be.

I was quite content to accept those better informed than I am that man's activities are causing the climate to change at an accelerating pace, until I noticed how swiftly the champions of this theory resorted to personal abuse at even the merest hint of dissent. That made me suspicious and these suspicions have continued to increase ever since.

good to see you evaluating these matters from a purely evidence-based perspective.

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Scientific consensus, such as it is, has been very wrong before, (flat earth, eugenics etc etc), so why must you make the foolish declaration it must be right this time?

no-one vaguely educated has seriously entertained the idea of a flat earth since the middle ages, and even as far back as Pliny or Augustine.